This shade was the painter of the picture entitled _Mort d'Henri II._ and of the _Procession du Corpus Domini._ Short chestnut hair, a rather narrow but intelligent forehead, blue eyes, long nose, fair moustaches and beard, complexion fresh and clear, dead lips smiling at life as in life they had smiled at death: this was the shade of Clément Boulanger. He bowed his tall figure towards me and I felt his breath touch my brow, like the kiss of a friend after a long journey. He kissed me on his return from death. Poor Clément! He was so bright, so witty, while he was painting in great washes the scene from the _Tour de Nesle_ representing Buridan "flung into the Seine," as Villon says, and borrowed from the _Écolier de Cluny_ by Roger de Beauvoir. "Friend," I say to him, "I knew but little of your life and still less of your death. You lived and died far away from me. You rest beneath the cypresses of Scutari, with the sky of the Bosphorus stretched above your head and the Sea of Marmora breaking at your feet; the blue doves come in at the half-opened windows of your chapel and circle round your tomb like loved friends! Tell me what I do not know, so that I may relate it to the generation which never knew you." I seemed to see a spark light up in the hollow eyes of the phantom, and a kind of smile pass over the pale lips. Life is so good a thing, whatever people say about it, that the dead tremble every time a living being pronounces their names. He spoke and I, in my turn, trembled in astonishment to hear merry words coming from the mouth of a phantom. He died without knowing he was going to die; his last convulsion was a laugh and his last words a song. * * * * *